FBX to PLY Converter
Convert an Autodesk FBX to ASCII PLY with positions, normals and vertex colours, for geometry-processing tools. Runs in your browser.
Drag & drop your FBX file here
or click to browse
Supported Formats
Format Information
Source Format
FBX.fbx
FBX (Filmbox Scene)
FBX is Autodesk's scene format, written by Maya, 3ds Max and MotionBuilder. It is a compact container for a whole DCC scene, which is why it is the usual hand-off format when a model comes back from a modelling or animation package.
What it carries: Meshes, UVs, vertex colours, materials with embedded texture maps, a bone hierarchy, skinning, and keyframe animation clips. Blend shapes and Autodesk-specific property types are not read by this converter.
Open a FBX file in the viewerTarget Format
PLY.ply
PLY (Polygon File Format)
PLY is a flexible text or binary format that can describe either a polygon mesh or a bare point cloud, depending on whether the file declares a face element alongside its vertices. That dual nature is why PLY appears in both modelling and LiDAR workflows.
What it carries: Per-vertex position, optional normals, optional RGB colours, optional UVs on mesh PLY files, and face indices. Image textures, material graphs and animation are not part of the format.
Open a PLY file in the viewerAbout this conversion
A DCC scene becomes a data file. The FBX geometry is flattened into an ASCII PLY 1.0 file carrying positions, normals and any vertex colours.
Why convert FBX to PLY
- Load the model into Open3D, PCL, trimesh or a geometry-processing library.
- Passing FBX material colours to a scientific visualisation or simulation tool.
- Produce a plain-text mesh you can post-process with a script.
What happens during the conversion
Geometry
Every mesh in the scene is flattened into one vertex list and one face list, with node transforms baked into the coordinates and faces triangulated. Positions, normals and texture coordinates are written where the source had them.
Materials and textures
Image textures are not transferred. What survives is per-vertex data: normals, and RGB vertex colours when the FBX used them.
Animation
FBX keyframe animation, skinning and morph targets have no representation in PLY, so a single static pose is written.
Common use cases
- Pulling a mesh out of an FBX scene into a geometry-processing script without a DCC tool installed.
- Moving a DCC asset into a simulation or research pipeline.
- Getting FBX geometry into a text format that command-line tools and scripts can process.
Limitations of this conversion
- The FBX material graph and its textures are not part of the PLY, so shading has to be re-applied in the target tool.
- Every mesh in the scene is written, hidden or not, because PLY is a flat data file with no hidden state.
- An FBX of the same shape is typically much larger than the ASCII PLY it becomes, but the PLY is far easier to read.
How to convert FBX to PLY
Three steps in the browser. Nothing is uploaded to a server, so an unwieldy file is limited only by your own device's memory.
Upload your .fbx
A single .fbx is all you need, with no sidecar texture folder.
Convert to PLY
The FBX hierarchy is baked down and written as one ASCII PLY 1.0 vertex and face list.
Load the .ply in your geometry tool
Expect a data file, not a scene.
Related tools and formats
Other conversions from this format
Check the file in a viewer
Frequently Asked Questions
Questions people ask when turning FBX files into PLY.
Looking for a different direction? See every supported conversion.